TRINITY SUNDAY MAY 22, 2016

From the Word of the Day

He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.All that belongs to the Father is mine.That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you. (John 16, 14-15)

How should we live this Word

In His last discourses between the Last Supper and His arrest, Jesus deals with serious and complex themes with His disciples that bring God’s Revelation to its completion. It is John who makes this known to us and, in the two verses quoted, He has us listen to Jesus who introduces the three Persons of the Trinity. Jesus tells them that the Spirit will arrive after Him and will take what is His and will tell them. In other words, if you do not understand and accept what I am showing you and telling you now, He will make it comprehensible. The Spirit will introduce them to what is of the Father and will explain the sense and meaning of His words and gestures, but above all, He will allow them to understand the relationship between the Persons: Jesus, His Father, and the Spirit.

The Spirit is the third Person who succeeds to make us change perspective and lets us recognize how to distinguish the Son from the Father in some way, leading us to say that He too, the Spirit, is a Person. The Spirit introduces us into intimacy with the Son, and from the Son, He renders the father accessible so we can see a new and complex system of relationships that render it possible for Love, who is God, to transmit Himself and generate Himself.

John introduces us to an experience of God that is personal and communitarian. From the revelation made to Moses in the burning bush, we now pass to a God-Word who takes a face, who has a name, and above all, who moves, acts, and makes His word efficacious in the world. From a terrible God from whom we must keep far away, we meet a God who is approachable, who comes to meet us and desires us to know Him and recognize His image in us that in turn, can be recognized by everyone. From the one God to a God community, a web of relationships that includes everyone, even our humanity, divinizing it and making it in God’s image; the possibility of new spaces to begin to live in communion for those who desire it.

Lord, Your divinity crosses our humanity. Help us to contemplate this mystery even in faces that are disfigured and seem to have lost every trace of You.

The Voice of Bishop Tonino Bello

Will I be able to explain to my gypsies the mystery of one God in three Persons? I will not speak of one plus one plus one because that makes three. I will speak of them one by one and thus, they will always be one. Thus, in God there is not one Person that we add one to the other. In God, every Person lives for the other.